I’VE BEEN GRANTED MY WISH to not have to face a circumcision. We have a simple baby-naming, instead. On a snowy morning in February, when Ayla is six months old, we clean and tidy, tucking tiny spit-up bibs and washcloths no larger than my palm out of sight. When the kitchen is spotless, I bring out a lace tablecloth that belonged to Vera, who died peacefully in 2001. I spread its elaborate pattern out on the table. I hang my framed photos of her lost children in the living room for everyone to see.
At eleven o’clock the doorbell starts ringing. Our family and friends arrive slowly and assemble in the living room, gathering around Rachel and Shayna, who will officiate together. Shayna begins to hum, softly and hypnotically; the crowd falls silent. I look out at their faces: Dad, my sister, Aaron and Sylvie, Debra. The faces of the many people who have been with me on this journey.
Ayla has been cloistered away with my mother, who has been given the honour of carrying her into the room. When they enter, a gasp of pleasure rises from the assembly. She is a beautiful baby. All parents think that of their child, but I am certain it is true. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed like her father, her fat limbs announcing the space she takes up in the world. Shayna’s humming blooms into full song, and when she lets loose the first high clear notes, Ayla’s body freezes and turns toward my friend, every bit of my daughter aimed at the beauty. A string of clear drool hangs from her plush pink lips; she blinks. Her first experience of being fully transported by art.
Ayla wears a white smock dress that was mine as a baby. Maybe it was the dress I wore to my christening.
Rachel explains that Ayla has entered the room to the same melody she will enter to on her wedding day. I can no more imagine Ayla getting married than I can imagine her speaking or walking, but there is something about Rachel’s certainty—her faith—that makes me trust it is true.
Rachel leads us through the parents’ dedication, but I am so overcome I cannot hear her words. I have to stop partway through the blessing because my throat is thick with feeling. I look into Rachel’s eyes and hang on. She has been the one to shepherd us from a place of absence into presence. When she recites the prayer welcoming Ayla, Rachel, too, has tears in her eyes.
The centrepiece of any baby-naming ceremony is the parents talking about the names they have chosen. Degan starts, telling our friends about the first time he heard the name Ayla, and how he immediately fell in love with it. It was a Scottish name, but later, after I got pregnant, he began to harbour the idea that it was an old name, a name with other roots. Hebrew roots.
It was. It did. Ayla can be short for the Hebrew ayala, meaning “deer.” Lithe and delicate, with light in the eyes.
Degan then speaks about the name Emily, passed down from both my sister and his paternal grandmother.
Then it is my turn to speak.
Ayla’s third name is Ruzenka, I say, after Dad’s paternal grandmother. She loved my father fiercely. She suffered the worst thing anyone can suffer—the deaths of two of her children in concentration camps. She grieved, and adapted with grace to what life dealt her. She believed, and taught Dad, that the most important thing was to have faith—of any kind—in God, the world and humanity.
But Ruzenka also believed in the particularity of religion. While the rest of her family pretended to be Christian, she held her Judaism close her entire life. She fasted on Yom Kippur. She lit candles on Shabbat. It is the light from Ruzenka’s candles, I tell our family and friends, that we want Ayla to grow up in. A light that, despite great adversity, has shone down the generations.
I look out again into the faces of everyone gathered. Dad and I lock eyes. I smile. He smiles. It is done.
Somewhere rain falls into the open sea. Genocide continues. There are no easy answers. Snow falls on a tombstone, furring it over with memory. My great-grandmother is buried in an unmarked grave in the sky.
My Christian mother holds my Jewish child in her arms. The rabbi, full of love, blesses the baby in Hebrew: bruchah haba’ah.
We repeat the blessing in English.